Alistair Rook
Alistair Tybalt Rook was born on February 9th, 1981 in Ashenhold. He attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry between 1992 and 1999, and was sorted into Hufflepuff house. He currently lives outside of Hogsmeade and is self-employed as an experimental potioneer. ((Most of what is contained here is not public knowledge and should not be used in RP without IC reason to know it. Please see OOC notes for more information.)) Early Life A Happy Family Alistair Tybalt Rook was born to Melisande and Tacitus Rook on a snowy February afternoon in 1981. He lived with his family in a small wizarding town called Ashenhold, located to the rural west of Liverpool. His parents met in a potion shop where Melisande had been working as an assistant after graduating. Tacitus, a junior member of the Animagus Registry, had come to collect reports about an unregistered animagus using his form to steal from the nearby shops. He fell for Melisande's sense of humor and good looks, and their follow-up interview at a cafe blossomed into a relationship. The couple had a whirlwind romance and married only a few months later. They quickly had their first child, a daughter named Melepomene. Melisande gave up her job at the potion shop to stay home and care for their quickly expanding family, selling potions on the side to support them. It had been her best subject in school and neighbors often came to her instead of brewing themselves. Two years after Melepomene came Alistair, and then barely a year later, Erebus. The children mostly got along, bickering like siblings do but tending to spend more time playing together than fighting. They would ride their toy broomsticks through the house and scare the family cat, toss around quaffles in the garden, and pick berries off the bushes surrounding their home. Melisande loved being able to stay with her kids while they grew up. Some nights, the couple would leave their kids with a neighbor and take off, going out to dance or have dinner. The Death of Melisande In early August of 1988, they left Melepomene in charge of her younger siblings and went out on a date. While eating in a pub, Tacitus received an urgent owl about ministry business and was forced to leave in a hurry, promising that he'd make it up to his wife later. Melisande lingered a while longer, enjoying the atmosphere and her food. As she finished up, her attention was drawn to a woman leaving the bar. The same woman had earlier been attempting to fend off the attentions of an unpleasant-looking man who didn't seem to understand or care that she had no interest in talking to him. Moments after the woman left, the same man followed her. Sensing that this could mean danger, Melisande quietly left as well, searching for the pair. She found them not far away, the man with his wand in the woman's face, shouting at her, and the woman cowering. Immediately, she stepped in, wand drawn, attempting to force the man to back down. He didn't. Instead, his attention turned on the interloper. Before she could react, he hit her with a full-force stunning spell and didn't stop, launching hexes and jinxes in a flurry of rage while the other woman fled. The sheer number of spells were too much for any one person to handle and the combination effects were deadly. Melisande collapsed, cold on the street, and the man fled. Drawn by the noise and light, neighbors gathered and ministry officials arrived soon after to take accounts. It wasn't long before news filtered back to her husband and children. After learning of Melisande’s death, Tacitus went mad with grief, blaming himself for what had happened. He left, not telling his children when he would be back or where he was going. The siblings waited for three days, eating what food was left in the house and trying to entertain themselves. By the end of the third day, Melepomene decided that something needed to be done. As the oldest, she took charge, sending the family owl off with a letter explaining their situation to the only authority she could think of: the Minister of Magic. Within hours, Ministry officials were on the scene and took the children into custody while starting a search for Tacitus. While he was eventually located in Scotland, he refused to come home. The death of his wife and the responsibility of caring for three small children was too much for him to take. He relinquished his rights as a parent and entirely abandoned his family. The New Normal Fortunately for Alistair and his siblings, a family member stepped up to care for them. They had only met their great uncle Victorus a handful of times at family gatherings but the man had always been exceptionally friendly and kind to his great niece and nephews. Having recently retired from his career as an Obliviator, he had plenty of time to look after the kids. The stipend of support sent by their father helped out, and while the small family was never rich, Victorus ensured they had everything they needed. On the one or two occasions their father turned up to see his kids, he was chased away by his furious uncle, calling him a coward and a failure. After one particularly violent attempted visit when Alistair was 13, his father never came back. The siblings slowly rebounded from losing their parents, though it had an impact on each of them. Erebus would cry whenever he was left alone for more than a few minutes and took to sleeping Alistair’s bed, not trusting that another person wouldn’t disappear from his life. Melepomene’s inherent magic went wild, breaking windows, tossing items around, and withering greenery, all while she was a similarly moody storm of a person. Meanwhile, Alistair went silent. He stopped speaking for days on end, barely responding to anyone. It was his silence which provoked his first display of magic, which temporarily removed his younger brother’s mouth when he was being too noisy on a particularly bad day. It took years for them to recover and return to a semblance of a normal life. Their new guardian was gentle, giving each child time to deal with what had happened and offering his support. By the time Melepomene started Hogwarts, things had mostly settled down. Life at Hogwarts First Year Alistair entered Hogwarts two years after his older sister and was sorted into Hufflepuff, the same house as his great uncle, who was excited to hear about the decision. It wasn't the most ideal year to start school but he made the best of it. Potions quickly became his favorite class and what he lacked in raw talent was made up for by a ferocious study habit. Along with a few other Hufflepuffs around the same year, he formed a study club in their common room and met religiously every week, no matter what was going on in the rest of the school. The study club, which they named Badger Brains, continued to meet every year until he graduated. Even decrees outlawing student clubs couldn't entirely stop them. No matter how grim the circumstances were outside, Badger Brains remained, held together by fierce Hufflepuff determination. Second Year In his second year, Alistair befriended the boy who would become his lifelong confidant, Avro Neilson. A year older than Rook and brimming with good humor, Av was the light-hearted jokester counterpoint to Al's serious nature. Towards the middle March, Alistair snuck out of his Herbology class and headed for the edge of the grounds, seeking out a secluded place where he could write a letter. It was a tradition he'd started in the years after his mother was killed, writing a letter to her around her birthday to tell her about what had been going on in his life. The practice had become sacred to him and he feared another student trying to take the note. In a grove right along the forbidden forest's edge, he bent over a rock and worked intently, the practice filling him with sorrow. It was this sorrow which attracted an unwelcome visitor - dementors. The creatures which had been patrolling for an escaped convict were drawn to his dark emotions and set upon him. Paralyzed, Alistair could only watch in terror as a pair of dementors loomed over him. Before they could get closer, however, a figure burst from the trees, yelling and waving his wand. Filled with anger and bright thoughts of happy days, the third year boy powered through the dementors and pulled Al away, saving him. After that, the pair became close friends. Alistair thought he would never quite be able to repay him for that, and Avro thought nothing of it. He had just done what felt right, no reward needed. Third Year Like most students who were present at Hogwarts during the school year of 1994 - 1995, Alistair was swept up in the Triwizard Tournament. It seemed to be a welcome reprieve from the strange, frightening events of his first two years in school, a celebration to lighten the mood and a great opportunity to meet witches and wizards from different countries. Along with nearly every other Hufflepuff, he broiled in outrage when Cedric was one-upped by the apparently illegal entry of Potter and soon adorned his bag and robes with "Support Cedric" buttons. He took his support of the true Hogwarts champion a bit far at times, landing himself in front of the Deputy Headmistress twice after hexing Gryffindors who insulted his house's champion. As the Yule Ball approached, a stumbling Alistair managed to successfully ask out Yvonne, an older Durmstrang student from Belarus. Though they couldn't understand each other half the time, they made great friends. She sparked Alistair's interest in learning Russian and taught him a few phrases. Before the end of the school year, the pair went on two more dates and continue to keep in touch as adults. A shadow was cast across fourth year from the end of third. Cedric's death hit every student hard and the Hufflepuffs hardest. Alistair didn't attend the funeral but he and his great uncle both sent flowers and spent a lot of time talking about what happened that summer. Neither wanted to believe that the dark lord could come back but Victorus had lived through the first war and clearly remembered the fear everyone had felt back then. He made time to speak to each of the children about his memories and what they could do to protect themselves should dark wizards threaten the world again. Erebus took everything to heart and quietly prepared to fight if he needed to, but Alistair and Melepomene were more skeptical, with Al believing his classmates who said Potter was a crackpot and blamed him for Cedric's death, and Mel set on ignoring anything that wasn't part of her NEWT preparations. Fourth Year Unfortunately, things continued on a downward slope into fourth year as the Ministry tried to quell fears and regain control over an educational system they were losing. In an effort to keep himself from lashing out at increasingly unfair situations, Alistair finally requested that his uncle send him all of his mother's diaries. She had kept journals from the time she was ten years old up until she died and had detailed much of her life and thoughts through them. Al had been too hurt by her passing to read them and balked whenever Victorus suggested it, so his uncle was thrilled when he finally requested the books. As soon as they arrived in the post, he immersed himself, spending the now regulation-filled free hours reading through his mother's life. Immediately, he realized how much of Erebus had come from their mother. They were both head-strong and rambunctious children - she often wrote of being given detention for things she did without thinking, like setting a rival's dinner on fire or levitating her desk. Her stories were funny, insightful, and, at times, felt quite similar to the things he was going through. Melisande recalled a few trips to France as a child where she'd visited with some distant relatives. Her father's side, the Lyons, had emigrated to the UK from France in the late 1800's and her diaries contained letters from second and third cousins who still lived there. The most surprising thing he learned while reading was that Melisande had been a natural legilimens, a trait passed down along her father's line and was still fairly prominent in their French relatives. She wrote of the skill as both an almost instinctive thing which came to her naturally and as something she worked hard at mastering. She believed strongly in not resting on her gifts exactly as they were, but bettering them through study and effort. Melisande wrote about falling in love with Tacitus quickly in part due to seeing how pure of motivation he was through his thoughts. Their whirlwind romance made her the happiest she had ever been and she spoke lovingly of him and their children in each chapter. It took months to get through all of the volumes and a while longer to process everything. By the time summer came around, Alistair's feelings settled. He felt some ability to forgive his father for leaving after seeing him through his mother's eyes, but he still had no desire to reconnect with the man who had left them alone on their darkest day. Fifth Year Fifth year was mercifully uneventful after the previous year's chaotic administration changes and the quiet was welcomed by the students getting ready for their OWLs and NEWTs. Al found time to study with Melepomene, who understood the stress of tests all too well. Thought they didn't always get along, he would miss her being at school with him. Along with his familiar Badger Brains friends, he had one of his most pleasant, successful years to date. By the end of the year he was sitting his first real, meaningful exams and making real decisions about what his future would look like. Encouraged by both his former and current potions professors, he decided to look into doing more experimentation with his brewing and discovering magic others had yet to find in their cauldrons. Just when things were looking up, tragedy came down like a dark phantom and swept hope from every student, dealing a double blow in short succession: Headmaster Dumbledore was killed, and then the Ministry fell. Once more, terror walked the streets and stalked the inhabitants of Britain with every step. Avro fled the country with his family - his mother was muggleborn and likely to be targeted by the death eaters. Students ran or disappeared, and even among those remaining, it was uncertain who would return to school. Not wanting them to bring scrutiny onto the family or become target, Victorus encouraged Erebus and Alistair to go back in September. Reluctantly, they both went. Sixth Year Within the castle, many students reacted violently to the new administration. Seeing someone dragged from class or hearing screams became common. Some stood up, rejecting the death eaters and attempted to make points against them, only to be rewarded with torture. Rumors floating among some students that a secret society was forming underground to fight, but evidence was scarce. Without a muggleborn relative in three direct generations, Alistair and Erebus were safe from the most heinous torments but their friends weren't always so lucky. While Al hid his anger, channeling it into his potions, his brother was less able to keep his feelings contained. In mid April 1998, he received a message from Erebus which asked to meet him in the divination tower after class. When he arrived, he found his brother with a broom over one shoulder and a filled backpack. Unable to take what was happening, he had made the decision to leave school and chase down death eaters on his own. There were rumors of other students doing the same. Alistair begged his brother to be reasonable and not go, but he wouldn't hear it. The last he ever saw of his stupid, brave little brother was the speck of a broom flying away from Hogwarts to seek justice. It wouldn't be until after the Battle of Hogwarts was done that he'd learn how Erebus had managed to kill two death eaters on his own, how he'd been tortured and murdered for it, and how his great uncle was similarly killed while taking revenge for his nephew's death. The war claimed their lives, and left Alistair and Melepomene with only each other. Seventh Year Grief covered the summer and crept up over the school year like a smothering blanket. Virtually no one was untouched by the war. September's classes were interspersed with dedications to monuments for the fallen. More detentions were given in the first three months of the school year than ever before, primarily stemming from fights between students whose parents had been death eaters and the relations of the dead. Alistair tried his best but couldn't contain his anger when he learned that the son of one of the death eaters who had killed his brother was there. He cornered the fourth-year boy and blasted him into the hospital wing with a nasty assault of spells. Headmistress McGonagall was unsympathetic, issuing detentions, required counseling sessions, a ban from Hogsmeade visits, and a final warning: Attack another student, no matter who they were, and be expelled. Still furious, he had no choice but to agree. Over the coming months, people began to heal and return to a semblance of normality. When students started to play pranks after the new year, it was a cause for relief: Hogwarts was back and things would, eventually, be okay. After a rough start to seventh year, Al cleaned up his act and buckled down for N.E.W.T season. After the fiasco of last year's classes, there was nearly double as much work to be done. Badger Brains' oldest students came together every night to study and prepare for what were bound to be even more difficult exams than usual. After last year, most hadn't even taken their apparition tests yet and were balancing the final finals on top of that extra class. A supply of calming draughts on hand, seventh years faced down May and June with grim determination. After the battle was over, quills lay broken in the halls and students learned their fates. His showed that the hard work he'd put in had paid off - only a single score under an E out of six exams. It was only a short wait until graduation, and then out to the real world. Grades OWL Subjects: *Potions (O) *Alchemy (O) *Magical Theory (O) *Herbology (O) *Defense Against the Dark Arts (E) *Charms (E) NEWT Subjects: *Potions (O) *Alchemy (E) *Magical Theory (O) *Herbology (O) *Defense Against the Dark Arts (E) *Charms (A) Life After Hogwarts The Potions Apprentice After graduating, Al sought out Nell Berwin, one of the few experimental potioneers remaining in Britain. She had written three well-regarded books on advanced potionmaking and potion improvisation. It took some time for the old woman to warm up to the idea of having an apprentice again. Her last one had finished in the 70s and she hadn’t sought another since she'd left. After a handful of chats, Alistair won her over with his work ethic and samples of potions he’d brewed. For the next five years, he worked under her exacting eye, brewing potions, being quizzed on ingredient properties, and drinking more potentially poisonous concoctions than most people would in their lifetimes. Nell wasn’t an easy woman to impress and forced him to remake potions so many times he thought he was going crazy, but her mentorship took him from a good potioneer to an excellent one. Alistair used the money he'd inherited from his parents and great uncle to purchase a small house just a few miles outside of Hogsmeade. The isolation offered plenty of space to start his work in potion making, but the closeness to town provided easy access to socialization and neighbors. He became a regular supplier of potions to families living in the area, much like how his mother sold to her neighbors. He had little interest in going into business selling his potions like some experimental potioneers did and instead opted to pursue deals with existing companies, offering them recipes to his potions in exchange for royalties or a lump sum. It didn't take long for him to get his first deal on a potion he'd invented during his apprenticeship. Inventing potions takes time, however, and he could go for months or years without a single successful experiment. Dee and Alistair On an extremely cold, snowy day in January of 2008, a musician at the Three Broomsticks caught his eye. He struck up a conversation with the girl and they kept talking long into the bitter cold night. Her name was Deidra and she was an aspiring singer/songwriter who was traveling around the country, performing in bars and trying to get noticed. Unfortunately, it wasn't going well so far. They kept running into each other in town over the next few months, and eventually Alistair decided to ask her out. While they had very different goals in life, they understood one another's desire to make something of their own and be independent. It wasn't long before they were a couple and she moved in with him. He finally proposed on Christmas of 2010. Dee and Alistair married in a small ceremony on September 29th, 2011, accompanied by a handful of friends and family. She fell pregnant soon after and they welcomed their son Timothy at the end of the year. Alistair insisted on honoring his brother's memory with his child's middle name, hoping that it might imbue his son with some of the courage and righteousness Erebus had carried. At his wife's insistence, he kept much of his potioneering contained to a workshop off of the main house so their child wouldn't accidentally get into the ingredients and poison himself. Dee, meanwhile, worked in vain on her singing career. She got a few bit roles, doing radio jingles or performing at a pub, but no real success. Without much stable income outside of royalty checks Alistair received off of his proprietary potions, the family often had to go without luxuries. Dee had difficulty dealing with their money situation. She'd grown up used to getting almost everything and was entirely unused to budgeting. They fought frequently, interspersed with bouts of happiness when one or the other found success. The Accident In 2018, Alistair began work on a new potion, a highly ambitious creation he called Shadow Serum. The goal was a potion which could be painted onto any surface or misted into the air, creating a long-lasting or permanent effect which made the area appear to be covered in darkness, obscuring whatever it was applied to, even in bright sunlight. He wanted the effect to be even deeper, longer-lasting and more impenetrable than similar products, even by magical light. For months, he toiled in his lab, trying different combinations and coming up unsatisfied with any of them. Six months into his creation, the perfect idea struck him, an ideal combination of ingredients. In his rush to combine ingredients, he accidentally destabilized the potion. One drop of wolverine saliva more and the whole mixture exploded. A few hours later, Timothy came to ask his father to play and discovered Alistair sprawled out on the floor, his face covered in a strange darkness which couldn't be wiped away. Dee managed to drag her husband's unconscious body to St. Mungo's Artifact Accidents department. It took hours for the healers to wake him up, and even awake, he couldn't recall what exactly he had added to cause the explosion. Unable to do much without risking an internal backfire from the unstable potion, they could only administer standard treatments and wait, a wait which dragged on for days. At first, the assumption was that Alistair was unable to see because of the cloud of shadow over his head and that his vision would return as soon as it was removed. That hope quickly evaporated once his potion started to wear off. Even without the shadowy mixture clinging to him, his eyes seemed to be sightless, unable to make out more than dim outlines in the bright hospital ward. It wasn't until he woke up at night and found everything clear as day that the truth was realized: the potion had reversed his perception of light, blinding him in light and allowing him to see in darkness. For nearly three months he remained in St. Mungo's while they tried to find a solution. Potions and spells of every shade were tried, and even some muggle treatments when those didn't work. Finally, they resolved that it was unlikely they would be able to directly repair his eyes and that a fix to help him function would serve better. Another month passed while specialists researched and created his first pair of glasses. The original set was unrefined, giving him some light vision but restricting his ability to see color and distance. While wearing them, the whole world was cast into a perpetual grey twilight. He was able to function and move but needed darkness to do his work. Life After Loss After returning home, Alistair and Dee's marriage began unraveling. During his time in the hospital she had signed a record deal with Crozley Records, a studio which was trying to create cross-world music stars. Dee was taking off and her first single getting play time on both muggle and magical radios. She was booked to perform live across the country but was unable to leave their son with a husband still recovering from his injuries. To make matters more difficult, Alistair's sleep schedule changed to match his vision, resulting in him rarely being awake for long during the daytime hours. When he was awake, he battled with depression and anxiety, and found it difficult to focus on his work. Their relationship became strained and communication devolved into shouting matches. Fed up with fighting and dealing with his issues, Dee left, taking Timothy with her and declaring that their relationship was done via howler. The departure of his wife wasn't unexpected and didn't hit Alistair too terribly hard. A bit of back and forth was able to negotiate a custody arrangement where his son spent part of the summer with him and was able to visit during Hogsmeade weekends in school. After years of unstable, emotional fights, it was almost freeing to be alone again, and he doubled down on his work. Alistair never returned to the potion which destroyed his sight. Though he wasn't one to back down from a challenge, that particular brew held so many bad memories that he couldn't bring himself to complete it. In the years since, he has continued his work with potions and led a quiet life just outside of Hogsmeade. Regular visits to St. Mungo's have upgraded his glasses to the point that they now give him fairly decent vision in daylight and his schedule has balanced to spending part of his waking hours in daylight, part in darkness. Personality Things don’t just come to Alistair the way they might for someone who is naturally gifted. His intelligence is the product of hard work. He could have easily been an A student and coasted along, but his interest in potions propelled him to study harder and make up what he lacked in pure talent with perseverance. Since he needed to work so hard to learn, he sees people who coast along on their intelligence as lazy and unambitious, often turning unpleasant when dealing with them. He harshly judges anyone who brags about their natural (in his eyes, unearned) talent. This has been the source of occasional arguments between him and his older sister, who is naturally talented. 'Why' is his favorite question and he is full of curiosity about the world, even after forty years. In his eyes, there are countless secrets to discover, just waiting behind the ordinary. He'll spend hours reading in-depth about a single creature or facet of the world to understand how it ticks. He believes that this is what makes him so good at creating new potions. A person without curiosity wouldn't bother discovering what happens when you change up the instructions to a potion or how the properties of different ingredients work in tandem, they would just accept what they're told. His desire to see beyond what he's told has also landed him into trouble and nearly killed him several times over, but he takes that as part of his career. He is a semi-regular visitor to St. Mungo's Artifact Accident ward and is on a first-name basis with several healers who treat cauldron explosions. He sees injuries as part of his job and isn't overly concerned about his health. To him, it would be fitting to die doing what he loves. However, his own wanton attitude towards safety does not extends to the rest of the world. Alistair takes a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach and sternly warns others to use safety precautions which he might ignore. He rarely sets up protection charms around his workspace to keep backfires, miasmas, and anything else created from getting out into the world. As with anyone who grew up during the years surrounding the Great Wizarding Wars, events from those times have had a long-lasting effect on him. He came out of the difficult days with the strong belief that every person must control their own destiny and steer their own ship. He could not allow his past or the things and people he had lost to hold him back from what he wanted to do. Each year, he marks the birthdays of his fallen friends and family members by drinking to their memory and keeping a promise he made to them: That no matter what, he wouldn't allow the darkness which took them from this world to triumph. He's only human though, and the days around the deaths of his friends and family member, particularly the Battle of Hogwarts, find him drinking heavily and getting into fights. Even he can't fend off the ghosts of loss which make him wonder if he could have prevented their deaths. Alistair opposes dark magic and tyranny in all forms. He's not outspoken in his beliefs but he will firmly rebuff anyone who seems headed in that direction and offer whatever aid he can to those fighting against evil. For him, it's as much about honoring the memories of those who fell during the war as it is about ensuring that evil never rises to power again. Rumor Has It All information in this section can be used IC without needing to ask if you would know it. *I’m pretty sure I saw a vampire in the Three Broomsticks. Family Melisande Johanah Rook (née Lyons) *Mother *Born: 03/19/1959 *Died: 08/04/1988 *Half-blood *Hogwarts Alumnus (Gryffindor) - 1970 to 1977 *Stay-at-home mother / Potion maker *Deceased Tacitus Dorian Rook *Father *Born: 08/04/1953 *Died: Unknown *Half-blood *Hogwarts Alumnus (Ravenclaw) - 1964 to 1971 *Animagus Registry Officer (until 1988) *Current whereabouts and status unknown Victorus Rook *Great Uncle *Born: 09/02/1906 *Died: 04/15/1998 *Half-blood *Hogwarts Alumnus (Hufflepuff) - 1917 to 1924 *Obliviator (Retired) *Deceased Melepomene Thalia Rook-Barras *Sister *Born: 01/28/1979 *Died: N/A *Half-blood *Hogwarts Alumnus (Ravenclaw) - 1990 to 1997 *Legal Librarian to the Wizengamot *Married to Angelina Barras-Rook *Children: Leo Rook-Barras, Jay Barras-Rook Erebus Nigel Rook *Brother *Born: 04/17/1982 *Died: 04/10/1998 *Half-blood *Hogwarts Student (Gryffindor) - 1993 to 1998 *Deceased Timothy Erebus Rook *Son *Born: 12/07/2012 *Died: N/A *Half-blood *Hogwarts Student (Ravenclaw) - 2023 to 2030 Deidra Helen Glasmus *Also known as Dee Glas *Ex-wife *Born: 11/02/1986 *Died: N/A *Half-blood *Hogwarts Alumnus (Slytherin) - 1997 to 2004 *Musician Etymology *Alistair is a Gaelic given name meaning 'Defender of Man'. *Tybalt is a variant of the given name Theobald and was first used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. It is a Germanic name meaning 'Bold People'. *Rook is a nickname surname first recorded in England during the 1200s. It comes from the bird of the same name and was given to people with dark hair or complexions. OOC Notes Alistair is played by Zhantee Fallen. I'm not on this account too often. Please message Arwyn Quandry if you need to get in touch with me. Since Alistair is an adult, it's very possible that other adults may be aware of some of the information here. I just ask that you IM me and discuss what your character knows before using it IC. I'm quite open to having a history with your character and welcome any prospective plots and RP! I'm also receptive to any plots which need a new potion created for them, as long as RPD approval for the potion and/or plot is given before you approach me. Also, if you're interested in playing any of his living family members, please ask me.